Commentary Magazine

I have some sympathy for President Obama’s speechwriters. A State of the Union address is inherently challenging to write because there’s a laundry list quality to them. (That was not the case for President Bush’s early State of the Union speeches, as we were able to focus on the war on terror, which created a clear hierarchy of priorities, allowing us to reject the usual input from various federal agencies). But what made Obama’s address last night doubly challenging is he clearly understands he cannot defend his record and won’t even try. That was obvious, given the glaring omissions in his speech. For example, Obamacare barely made a cameo appearance last night while his stimulus package was kept off-stage completely.

Then there is the fact that the president has no compelling second-term agenda to offer (something I wrote about yesterday). And since a State of the Union address imposes some constraints on Obama’s favorite rhetorical device these days, which is to accuse Republicans of being unpatriotic and very nearly sadistic, what’s a presidential speechwriter to do?

One option is to have Obama say in 2012 almost exactly what he said in 2010 and 2011. The problem with that is it’s not only rhetorically uncreative, it’s downright embarrassing. (See here:) Another is to try to recapture the glory days of 2008 by attacking “cynicism” and declaring “Washington is broken.” The problem here is the president himself has done an extraordinary amount to deepen cynicism and add to the disrepair of Washington. A third option would be to parrot Bill Clinton’s approach, right down to advocating “small ball” proposals and using Clintonian phrases like siding with Americans who “work hard and play by the rules.” But we can all agree there’s something a bit pathetic in seeing a president who views himself as a world-historical figure giving more attention to his proposed Trade Enforcement Unit than to his signature domestic achievement.

In any event, last night the president embroidered all three approaches into his speech, along with the usual touch of class warfare rhetoric and a few dollops of misleading claims. (To take but one example: Obama again said billionaire Warren Buffett “pays a lower tax rate than his secretary,” even though this assertion is at best wildly incomplete. What the president won’t tell you is that (a) corporations pay up to a 35 percent tax on their profits before shareholders receive a plug nickel and (b) the real tax rate on corporate income paid to individuals through capital gains and dividends is roughly 45 percent once you count the tax on corporate profits.)

The result of all this was yet one more mediocre address by a president who was, his supporters assured us only a few years ago, the greatest American orator since Lincoln. Obama’s State of the Union address was a political document, not a governing one, and the goal of this speech was transparently political: use poll-driven language and poll-driven proposals to appeal to white working-class Americans, a demographic which Obama is doing terribly with right now.

But what was perhaps most striking is the State of the Union address last night had almost nothing useful to say about how to create economic growth. Beyond that, there was no correspondence between the speech and the objective needs of the nation. The greatest domestic threat we face is our exploding debt. The main driver of it is entitlement programs, most especially Medicare. Which means the structural reform and modernization of Medicare should be a top priority for America. Yet the president not only isn’t addressing that problem; he’s done a tremendous amount during the last three years to worsen it. And now, with nine months to go before re-election, he’s attempting to distract the polity by offering up a counter-narrative that goes like this: The main problem in America today is income inequality, not the unprecedented projected trajectory of our debt. (Whatever one makes of income inequality, and there are problematic elements to it, it does not belong in the same galaxy of concerns as our exploding debt.)

Obama is doing everything in his power to promote this fiction. It is the duty of the loyal opposition and every honest public intellectual to call the president out on this.

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If the “blue wave” that Democrats see building ahead of November does not arrive with the ferocity they envision, the political left can still take solace in some of the victories they’ve already won. In that event, the Republican Party would have narrowly escaped losing a national referendum, but that doesn’t mean that Republicans have escaped defeat. Even today, the GOP is a broken husk of its former self.

Over the weekend, progressives and liberal populists gathered at the annual Netroots Nation conference to revel in their ascendancy, but their confidence is not unjustified. One after the other, Democratic presidential hopefuls flattered the crowd of activists and, more important, professed their shared policy preferences. A single-payer health care system estimated to cost $32 trillion over a decade, expanded social security, tuition-free college, the forgiveness of student-loan debt, a $15-per-hour national minimum wage, a federal employment guarantee, a dramatic paring back of the nation’s immigration-enforcement agencies; these and more formerly radical ideas are gaining real purchase. Even the centrist Ohio Democrat Tim Ryan swore requisite fealty to the progressive agenda.

Anyone with a sense of modesty and frugality will find this reckless profligacy appalling. Even the immodest possessed of a passing familiarity with unintended consequences must concede, for example, that a massive minimum-wage hike amid a wave of automatization might not be so compassionate after all. But the point of these ideas is not that they are especially feasible—they’re not. The point is just that they deserve to be called ideas. Democrats who dismiss the innumeracy and toxic racial obsession exhibited by their party’s left flank as passionate fringe elements are making a big mistake. The fringe is where the energy is. It’s where the canvassers and the small-dollar donors are. And it’s where the coalition’s ideas are conceived. As such, the fringe doesn’t stay fringe for long.

Republicans know that all too well. At the dawn of this political moment—one that would culminate in the kind of Republican domination of state and federal government unseen in nearly a century—the GOP, too, had its wacky fringe. But the margins weren’t merely sources of embarrassment. They were fonts of enthusiasm and intellectual vitality. The libertarian-tinged conservatives who spent the Obama years organizing, strategizing, and pitching sweeping legislative reforms at CPAC may not have overtaken the GOP, but no one could convincingly argue that they did not have a serious influence on the Republican Party.

Today, that vibrancy is gone. The conservative movement in and out of Congress is not dedicated to the advancement of its ideas but to preventing the other guy’s ideas from coming to fruition.

From the confirmation of judges, whose chief qualification is their opposition to bizarre new readings of the Constitution that justify sweeping liberal policy objectives, to the non-enforcement of onerous regulations by the executive, the stuff that energizes the Republican Party’s activists and intellectuals is utterly unambitious. Gone are the days when conservatives promised to overhaul the nation’s health-care system, devolve federal powers back to the states, scale back the IRS, and render the nation’s ballooning entitlement programs sustainable. Gone is the CPAC that served as an arena of competing ideas. The desire to out-compete the left has been replaced by the fleeting satisfaction of triggering liberals’ gag reflexes on Twitter.

According to Cory Bliss, chief strategist for a PAC dedicated to preserving the GOP’s House majority, the messages that really jazz Republican voters are entirely negative. “If the choice is, ‘Do you want to raise middle-class taxes? Do you want to abolish ICE? Do you want Nancy Pelosi as speaker?’ That’s a debate we’ll win,” he told the New York Times recently. A Republican voter in Ohio’s 12th congressional district summed up the GOP agenda more succinctly: “We’ve got to protect President Trump.” But for what? Republicans asked the public for prohibitive political power and got it, but now that power is dedicated solely to its own preservation.

There’s a lot to be said for running block. William F. Buckley distilled the conservative ethos in National Review’s mission statement as “someone who stands athwart history, yelling Stop,” and the bulwarks that Republicans have erected in the effort to impede the advance of cultural and economic liberalism are impressive. But there is a concession in all this negative partisanship, and it’s a sad one from the conservative perspective. It is that the legislative phase of this period of unique Republican dominance is over. The ball is not going to advance. The GOP is already on defense.

This strange bunker mentality is entirely unjustified. The appeal of a persecution complex notwithstanding, Republicans are still the masters of their destiny. There are no observable conditions that have forced them into a position of servility. With 92 days to go before the midterms, this docility on the part of the party in power is as inexplicable as it is inexcusable.

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The first of the week’s COMMENTARY podcast explores the controversy around the newest member of the New York Times editorial board, Sarah Jeong, who spent years inveighing against “white people” on Twitter. Will that have any political impact, or is it only a preoccupation of the political class? Also, Donald Trump confesses the Trump tower meeting wasn’t just about adoptions after all…

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Politico contributing editor Bill Scher isn’t the first to claim that the only responsible way for Trump-skeptical conservative to oppose the president is to register as Democrats, but his is one of the most charitable and honest of those appeals. It deserves a comprehensive response. Toward that end, I’d contend that Scher has conservative thought leaders confused with legislators and political organizers. He has mistaken those who adhere to inviolable conservative principle with influence-seekers who are bound to a constituency, not ideas. Finally, he has adopted a narrow view of the current political moment that has blinded him both to what the Democratic Party truly is and the incentives to which conservatives in political exile respond.

Scher began by noting that a few influential Trump critics in the conservative movement have left the Republican Party in the Trump era, and a few are even rooting for a Democratic takeover of one or both chambers of Congress in November. This is, in his estimation, a half-measure unequal to the gravity of the moment and generally not in this group’s interests. There is no country for a homeless pundit. They will need a tribe if they are to be effective and, ultimately, protected.

Outside the tent, Scher claims, the Democratic Party will continue to move left and become even more unappealing to those on the right. The party can serve as a haven for conservative refugees, he insists, if they’d only just throw off their partisan blinders. Ideologically diverse, accommodating, and conciliatory, Scher insists that Democrats maintain the last true big tent. “[I]f you are primarily horrified at how Trump is undermining the existing international political and economic order—hugging Russia, lauding strongmen, sparking protectionist trade wars—then becoming a Democrat is your best option,” he wrote.

This isn’t just a terrible misunderstanding of what animates Trump’s conservative critics; it is a misguided and ultimately deceptive misrepresentation of the modern Democratic Party.

Scher makes the point repeatedly that the Trump-skeptical conservative movement has utterly lost the debate and the GOP with it. In 2016, most of the party’s voters rejected the doctrinal conservatism to which they cling. What else is new? The Republican Party has not always been a conservative party. Conservatives waged a 20-year struggle to displace the progressive ethos that typified the GOP from T.R. to Eisenhower. Preserving the GOP’s ideological predisposition toward conservatism is a constant struggle, but it is one that conservative opinion makers relish.

Trump’s critics in the conservative movement abandoned him not just because of his temperamental defects, but because of his progressive impulses. The president’s skepticism toward free trade, his conciliatory posture toward hostile regimes abroad, his Keynesian instincts, his apathy toward budget deficits, and his general amenability toward heedless populism are traits that traditionally appeal to and are exhibited by Democrats. Why would conservatives join that which they are rebelling against?

Scher’s contention that the Trump-skeptics in conservative ranks would have more influence over the Democratic Party than the GOP is bizarre. The anti-Trump right is far too small a contingent to have any impact on the evolutionary trajectory of the Democratic Party, even if they were to abandon the principles that led them into the wilderness in the first place. They do, however, enjoy influence over American politics wildly disproportionate relative to their numerical strength.

Trump-skeptical conservatives are ubiquitous features on cable news. Their magazines and websites are enjoying a renaissance. They haunt their comrades who have made their peace with Trumpism. Most critically, they represent the strain of conservatism to which the majority of the Republican Party’s congressmen and women are loyal because it was that brand of conservatism that led them into politics in the first place. The worst-kept secret of the Trump era is that this president receives his highest marks when he’s doing conventionally conservative things. When the president behaves as he promised to on the campaign trail, Republicans rebel and often rein in his worst impulses. It’s not much, but it is a sign that a partial restoration of the status quo ante is not unthinkable.

Scher frequently cites exceptions within the Democratic firmament as though they do not illustrate the rule. He claims that the Democratic Party is not “a rotten cauldron of crass identity politics, recreational abortion, and government run amok.” As evidence, he cites the fact that a handful of pro-life Democrats have managed to resist the party’s purge of that formerly-common view, but that is an admission of heterodoxy. The Democratic Party’s fealty to divisive identity politics is hardly a figment of conservative imaginations. From Salon.com to the New York Timesopinion page, many on the left, too, have soured on the party’s attachment to racial and demographic hierarchies. And as for the party’s reputation for profligacy, Democrats can renounce the works of the 111th Congress—the last time the party had total control of Washington—whenever they muster up the gumption.

Scher believes it is inconsistent for conservatives to support a Democratic takeover of one or more legislative chambers and not support the Democratic agenda, but there is nothing inconsistent about it. Conservatives who think the GOP-led Congress has proven an insufficient check on the GOP-led executive are placing a vote of confidence in the Constitution, not the progressive agenda. If the cohort formerly dubbed #NeverTrump conservatives believe Democrats would be a better governing party than the GOP, they should certainly register Democratic at the nearest opportunity. If they believe that, though, they’re not #NeverTrump conservatives at all. They’re just #NeverTrump.

Conservatives are no strangers to being torn between their principle and their influence. Conservative opinion makers have been compelled to choose between proximity to power and their core values before. Those who chose temporary isolation in order to shield conservative beliefs from being disfigured by those who do not cherish them might not enjoy the gratitude they’ve earned. But they left behind a markedly more conservative country than the one they were born into.

The lessons of recent history are clear: Those who are content to sacrifice their principles for access and influence preserve neither in the long run.

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Polls say a majority of Americans believe both Republican and Democratic politicians are out of the mainstream. So where is the mainstream? Who represents the mainstream? Are there centrist politicians any longer? Or are “centrists” just soft liberals in disguise and therefore represent very little? It’s a podcast from 30,000 feet. Give a listen.

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The behavior of many attendees of Donald Trump’s campaign-style rally in Florida on Tuesday night was barbaric. There’s no other way to put it. The footage of rally-goers’ menacing and shouting profanity at reporters in slavish observance of the president’s goading was unbecoming of the citizens of a republic that values a free and independent press. The normalization of the radical anonymous conspiracy theorist “Q,” who is conspicuously obsessed with the idea that child sex trafficking is a popular liberal pastime, is disgraceful. A target of last night’s frenzied crowd, CNN’s Jim Acosta claimed that the “the hostility whipped up by Trump and some in conservative media will result in somebody getting hurt.” Indeed, this was a hostile assembly, and such crowds are capable of astonishing violence. But, as he later learned and revealed, Acosta was probably not in that kind of danger.

When Acosta descended from the podium on which he broadcasts, he calmly approached his abusers and invited them to speak—most of them happily accepted. This isn’t the first time that Acosta has served as the object of a mob’s derision, only for their ire to transform into celebrity-worship when the cameras go off. No one should minimize the potential for savagery here; it would not be the first time that the president has incited his followers to acts of violence, and the media figures and outlets Trump singles out endure harassment and credible threats from the president’s most unhinged fans. But there is a performative aspect to the Two Minutes Hate directed toward Acosta. He serves as their foil, the heel who absorbs the crowd’s fury in the ring only to sign autographs for his hecklers backstage. And there’s some evidence that Acosta relishes that role.

That doesn’t excuse any of this behavior. Indeed, it makes it worse. In his conduct as America’s chief executive, Donald Trump has inflamed and aggravated tensions to serve his own narrow ends. That objective is so transparent, though, that most who participate in this performance must do so knowing it is a farce. In willingly suffocating their better angels with a pillow, Trump and his allies may be radicalizing the truly unhinged who cannot see through the act. Perhaps more depressing, the Trumpified Republican Party is acclimating itself to behaviors and policies that would have been considered unspeakably callous not all that long ago.

In that speech before a group of veterans last week, Trump implied that media reports of businesses or individuals hurt by his trade war were pure fabrications. “Don’t believe the crap you see from these people, the fake news,” Trump said to cheers. “What you are seeing and what you are reading is not happening.” That goes for polling data, too. At least, polling that the president doesn’t like. “Polls are fake, just like everything else,” Trump insisted this week before citing his own standing among Republicans as determined by—what else?—polls.

The only way to avoid feeling insulted by this naked contempt for the audience’s intelligence is to convince yourself that this is all a game. Maybe rally goers think that blind displays of fealty to the president frustrate all the right people. Maybe they love being swept up in the performance art of it all, and Jim Acosta might as well be the Iron Sheik to Trump’s Hulk Hogan. The bottom line is that the audience believes they’re part of the act.

But Trump’s acolytes are endorsing or excusing shameful behavior that no one should tolerate from public servants or the government of which they are a part.

Donald Trump is fond of reciting portions of civil-rights activist Oscar Brown Jr.’s 1963 poem, “The Snake,” from behind the lectern to impugn foreign refugees fleeing war and poverty abroad as sleeper agents who seek only to do Americans harm. This isn’t just agitation; it’s policy. The United States took in just 33,000 refugees last year, the lowest intake in over a decade and well below the quota. This year, administration officials led by immigration antagonist Stephen Miller hope to resettle only 15,000 refugees, a decline that experts contend is designed to allow the private charities and public mechanisms that facilitate resettlement to atrophy permanently.

At first, Trump was happy to defend his “zero tolerance” policy, which became a euphemism for breaking up families at the border to deter future border crossers. He incoherently blamed “Democrat-supported loopholes” for the policy while simultaneously insisting that a secure nation cannot have a “politically correct” immigration policy, all to the sound of applause. Only when the backlash became so great did he back off this draconian policy, and his fans cheered him for that, too.

The public outcry that erupted following the termination of “zero tolerance” has abated, but the horrors have not. In testimony before Congress on Tuesday, a Health and Human Services official confessed that they knew the “separation of children from their parents entails significant risk of harm to children.” The psychological abuse associated with this policy has occasionally led to outbursts among incarcerated children, leading U.S. government officials to administer regular doses of psychotropic medication to their charges without the consent of a parent or guardian—a practice that a district judge halted in a sweeping ruling on Monday.

The president’s rallies exemplify the post-truth moment, in which his supporters adopt Trump’s penchant for moral and intellectual malleability as though it was a virtue. As Jonah Goldberg observed, the president’s vanguard has seamlessly transitioned from claiming that there was no evidence that the president welcomed the interference of Kremlin operatives in the 2016 election to contending that welcoming such interference would not violate any statutes to insisting that cooperation with hostile foreign powers for political gain is just best practice. Likewise, when Trump’s crowds chant “lock her up” nearly two years into the Trump administration, they know that’s not going to happen. It’s the kind of banana republicanism that owns the libs, and that’s all that matters.

For Trump’s fan base and his phalanx of enablers in the conservative press, this is all a big gimmick, and they think they’re in on it. It’s all just talk, and so the stakes must be low. Anyone who over analyzes the impact of a presidential pronouncement just doesn’t get him—not like his infinitely forgiving admirers do. But this is not a game. The behavior of the most powerful man on earth matters. Pretending it does not only to posture as self-righteous is no nobler than the hysterics to which Trump’s perspectiveless critics are prone. They are players occupying two different roles on the same stage, both taking their direction from the president.

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